Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

This is not just a problem for philosophers of religion. It is equally a problem for sociologists of religion, psychologists of religion, and other social scientists—economists, political scientists—and for those few brave neuroscientists and other biologists who have decided to look at religious phenomena with the tools of their trade. One of the factors is that people think they already know everything they need to know about religion, and this received wisdom is pretty bland, not provocative enough to inspire either refutation or extension. In fact, if you set out to design an impermeable barrier between scientists and an underexplored phenomenon, you could hardly do better than to fabricate the dreary aura of low prestige, backbiting, and dubious results that currently envelops the topic of religion. And since we know from the outset that many people think such research violates a taboo, or at least meddles impertinently in matters best left private, it is not so surprising that few good researchers, in any discipline, want to touch the topic. I myself certainly felt that way until recently.

These obstacles can be overcome. In the twentieth century, a lot was learned about how to study human phenomena, social phenomena. Wave after wave of research and criticism has sharpened our appreciation of the particular pitfalls, such as biases in data-gathering, investigator-interference effects, and the interpretation of data. Statistical and analytical techniques have become much more sophisticated, and we have begun setting aside the old oversimplified models of human perception, emotion, motivation, and control of action and replacing them with more physiologically and psychologically realistic models. The yawning chasm that was seen to separate the sciences of the mind (Geisteswissenschaften) from the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) has not yet been bridged securely, but many lines have been flung across the divide. Mutual suspicion and professional jealousy as well as genuine theoretical controversy continue to shake almost all efforts to carry insights back and forth on these connecting routes, but every day the traffic grows. The question is not whether good science of religion as a natural phenomenon is possible: it is. The question is whether we should do it.

2 Should science study religion?

Look before you leap.

—Aesop, “The Fox and the Goat”

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Research is expensive and sometimes has harmful side effects. One of the lessons of the twentieth century is that scientists are not above confabulating justifications for the work they want to do, driven by insatiable curiosity. Are there in fact good reasons, aside from sheer curiosity, to try to develop the natural science of religion? Do we need this for anything? Would it help us choose policies, respond to problems, improve our world? What do we know about the future of religion? Consider five wildly different hypotheses:

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1. The Enlightenment is long gone; the creeping “secularization” of modern societies that has been anticipated for two centuries is evaporating before our eyes. The tide is turning and religion is becoming more important than ever. In this scenario, religion soon resumes something like the dominant social and moral role it had before the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century. As people recover from their infatuation with technology and material comforts, spiritual identity becomes a person’s most valued attribute, and populations come to be ever more sharply divided among Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and a few other major multinational religious organizations. Eventually—it might take another millennium, or it might be hastened by catastrophe—one major faith sweeps the planet.

2. Religion is in its death throes; today’s outbursts of fervor and fanaticism are but a brief and awkward transition to a truly modern society in which religion plays at most a ceremonial role. In this scenario, although there may be some local and temporary revivals and even some violent catastrophes, the major religions of the world soon go just as extinct as the hundreds of minor religions that are vanishing faster than anthropologists can record them. Within the lifetimes of our grandchildren, Vatican City becomes the European Museum of Roman Catholicism, and Mecca is turned into Disney’s Magic Kingdom of Allah.